10 Questions for Douglas McNabney

Posted on July 6, 2013 by barczablog

Born and raised in Toronto, violist  Douglas McNabney is one of Canada’s most distinguished chamber musicians.  He has enjoyed an international performing career with appearances in Holland, Belgium, France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, Switzerland, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as performances throughout Canada and the U.S.A. He has recorded for, among others, BRT (Brussels), Radio Bremen, RTE (Dublin), Finnish Broadcasting (Helsinki), Sudwestdeutscher Rundfunk (Karlsruhe), Norwegian Radio (Oslo), Radio Sweden (Stockholm), NPR (USA), and the CBC. His recording on the Oxingale label of the Mozart Divertimento with Jonathan Crow and Matt Haimovitz was nominated for a Juno in 2007 and his Dorian recording of Mahler with the Smithsonian Chamber Players was nominated for a Grammy in 2008. He has recorded for Dorian, Amberola, Marquis, Oxingale, and CBC Enterprises labels.

As one of Canada’s most active chamber musicians, he has appeared as guest artist with the leading chamber music groups and societies across Canada. His chamber music partners include Canadians Marc-André Hamelin, Louis Lortie, André Laplante, Anton Kuerti, James Ehnes and internationally renowned soloists Menachem Pressler, Steven Isserlis, Jamie Buswell, William Preucil, Miriam Fried, among many others. He has performed with the SuperNova Quartet, the Crow-Haimovitz-McNabney Trio, the Orfordto.org/”; Quartet, the Penderecki Quartet, the Alcan Quartet, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the St Lawrence Quartet, Sante Fe Pro Musica, Millennium, the Gryphon Trio, the Allegri String Quartet, le Quatuor Artur Leblanc, Amici, New Music Concerts (Toronto), the Toronto Chamber Players, Amadeus Ensemble, Scotia Chamber Players, the Acadia Chamber Players, the Winnipeg Chamber Music Society, Musica Camerata de Montréal, and Les Chambristes de Montréal. He has appeared in most of the major festivals in Canada including le Festival international du Domaine Forget, le Festival international de Lanaudière, Orford; International Festival, Galway International Festival (Ireland), Music at Speedside, Festival du Bic, the Scotia Festival, Kammermusikfest Kloster Kamp, Linfort (Germany), Festival of the Sound, the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, BargeMusic, (New York), Festival Canada, Music at Blair Atholl (Scotland), Festival de musique de chambre de Montréal, le Club musical de Québec, and many others.

Also renowned as an arts administrator, Douglas McNabney was Artistic Director of the Domaine Forget Music Festival and Academy from 2001 until 2005. He was Chair of the Department of Performance of McGill University from 2004 to 2008 during a period of extensive renewal and growth of the Faculty. In 2009, Douglas McNabney was responsible for the artistic direction of the Haydn 2009 project at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal where the complete cycle of all 68 String Quartets was performed in one week. The event featured guest quartets from across North America and Europe and renowned Haydn scholars in conference with a total public attendance in excess of 6,000 entries.
Douglas McNabney is currently Professor of Chamber Music at the Schulich School of Music of McGill. He also pursues a busy schedule of appearances as soloist and guest artist in festivals and with chamber music societies and ensembles across Canada and Europe. He was appointed Artistic Director of Toronto Summer Music in August 2010.

As we approach the opening of the 2013 Toronto Summer Music Festival on July 16th I ask McNabney 10 questions: five about himself and five more about the TSM.

1) Are you more like your father or your mother?

Violist – teacher – administrator Doulas McNabney

Neither…. (Although my wife might have a different opinion!) I was very much the black sheep of the family, and although our family was a large one, there was no background in music or the arts and no role models. If pressed, I would say I have my father’s sensitivity and my mother’s stubbornness, in equal measure.

I think I am not alone among musicians who wonder where the consuming passion for their art comes from. It defines us and sets us apart, on occasion, even from our families. Unless it is a family of musicians – like my wife’s! Both of her parents are musicians and they have four children, all musicians who married other musicians. And now my two children are musicians! My daughter is a harpsichordist, like her mother, and grandmother before her. Third generation of harpsichordists… It’s like the Bach family – but, sign of the times, all women!

My son is a wonderful double bass player. As a family, when we have occasion to all play together, (it is rare – not a lot of repertoire for harpsichord, viola and double bass!) – we are no longer parent and child, we are three musicians. Music is what knits my family together.

2) What is the best thing or worst thing about being Artistic Director of an annual music festival?

After struggling all year with the logistics and the constant preoccupation of funding to bring the artists, the music and the public together, the best part is unquestionably witnessing the moment of the creative act – a performance. Watching and listening to a musician, whether seasoned pro or young artist, discover on the spur of the moment, a new sound, turn of phrase, timing or significance to the unfolding of the music, is a thrill. And it’s equally satisfying to see the audience appreciate that moment. The lives of the artists and the audience are immeasurable enriched by the experience. As musicians, we all live for those moments; as audience we’re touched by a grace that takes us out of our more ordinary lives…. That’s a bit heavy, but true!

3) Who do you like to listen to or watch?

I hardly watch tv. When I have the chance, I will try to watch a good film (which excludes most Hollywood fare!)

The act of listening to music is not something I can do casually. I’m drawn in and cannot do or think about anything else when there’s music being played. So I don’t listen to music when I sit back and relax. I hope this doesn’t shock people – but I prefer silence! When I’m too tired to do anything productive, I’ll watch Mad Men on itunes. It’s a sixties thing, a world I grew up in and there’s something very subversive about it that appeals to me. I feel like layers of significance to all kinds of inexplicable things of my childhood are being revealed.

4) What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?

Sometimes I wish I was a better singer. But then, maybe I would not have become a string player? I think I’ve reached the stage in life where I feel there’s nothing to be gained nor lost by pretending to be anything other than what I am, deficiencies included!

5) When you’re just relaxing and not working what is your favourite
thing to do?

I would say my other passion in life, apart from family, food, and fine wine, is architecture. I like to study buildings and read about the people who designed them. I also like to design and build things myself. I’m finishing a summer house at the moment that I designed from the ground up. I like the sense of completion in construction and renovation. Once a room is painted, it’s done, finished. I never get that sense of completion in my professional life. There’s always more music to practise, another festival season to plan, etc. It’s endless. Which is also a good thing of course, because there’s always an excellent reason to get up in the morning and get going!

Douglas McNabney (photo: Bo Huang)

Douglas McNabney (photo: Bo Huang)

 ~~~~~~~

Five more concerning Douglas McNabney’s ongoing commitment to Toronto Summer Music Festival as their Artistic Director

1) Please talk about how you reconcile the disparate aspects of your life: as a performer, a teacher and academic, and as an administrator & impresario.

It’s interesting. I feel all the various roles I’m fortunate to play are complementary, not incompatible. Being a teacher helps me reflect upon what I do as a performer. Being an academic at a university like McGill has made me a more efficient administrator, etc. And the various tasks require a different energy. After a day full of rehearsing and practicing, I can turn to writing or reading and email feeling quite fresh. I could never do another 4 or 5 hours of rehearsing, but easily manage to do that in administrative tasks. And vice-versa.

2) what do you love about programming a Festival such as TSM?

Programming the TSM Festival is a tremendously satisfying challenge to meet every year. I can draw upon years of experience from every facet of my career. A degree in Musicology from U of Toronto, my performing career as a chamber musician, my administrative career at McGill and 10 years in the Artistic Direction at Domaine Forget in Charlevoix, QC, – every one of those roles and that collective experience informs my choices. I have also had the good fortune to meet and perform with some incredibly gifted colleagues. Bringing these musicians to Toronto for the first time and sharing their particular genius with the public is very rewarding.

I also love following the trail of an idea through the research it inspires and discovery of repertoire that I’ve never come across. There is so much great music out there and programming repertoire that is new to me is one of the most gratifying aspects of planning a season.

I am by nature very curious. I’m always looking for ‘why did this happen?’, ‘where did this come from?’ and ‘what was the inspiration behind this?’ No artist works in a vacuum! There is a context – historical, social, political, and cultural – for every great work of art. Discovering connections and threads of commonality in works of art is, to me, endlessly fascinating. I try to encourage our public to share that sense of discovery and I hope the programming inspires a curiosity to find connections of their own.

3) Do you have a favourite program in the Festival?

Apart from the obvious answer that a parent can have no favourite children, I am particularly proud that we were able to manage to produce the concert with Katia and Marielle Labèque on August 1st entitled The Minimalist Dream House project.

Katia et Marielle Labèque (photo by Brigitte Lacombe): click on photo and then click “The Labèques’ Minimalist Dream House” for more information

This is perhaps the most daring programming we have ever presented at TSM. The MDH project is a retrospective of Minimalism in music– a style many love to hate but that had undeniable impact on music of the last half of the 20th century. It is a unique, intelligent and multi-genre presentation that traces minimalism in music from its origins in the music of Satie, through Cage, Glass and Reich to Arvo Pärt. The program will be a marathon in three parts. The first features the Labèque sisters performing Satie, Glass, Cage and Pärt. They are fabulous performers. In the second and third parts of the program, they will be joined by their band from Paris and will trace the influence of minimalism even through popular genres including rock music. Yes, the music of Radiohead and Sonic Youth with a rock band onstage backing up the Labèque sisters will be part of this year’s TSM Festival! I hope our traditional audience will forgive me – but I am a long-time fan of Radiohead. Having their music as part of the TSM Festival represents a personal triumph of sorts…

(One of many Radiohead transcriptions for piano one can find on youtube)

4) How do you relate to the world of classical music as a modern man?            

I suspect I relate to classical music the way people always have and always will! I refuse to despair that it is a dying art. To paraphrase Charles Rosen, the death of classical music is perhaps one of its longest continuing traditions! There are chamber music festivals springing up in every corner of the continent. There are clearly difficulties and we are in a period of transition and upheaval, especially for the corporate/business model of ‘delivering the product’(!) And yet, despite the omnipresence of music everywhere in our lives today (elevators, Loblaws, and hospital corridors), people still crave the intimacy and connection to a performer that only comes from live performance.

Not long ago I came across an amazing anecdote (not yet verified!), that of the 25 billion songs downloaded from the itunes store as of February 2013, 15% were classical. I believe people intuitively can recognize a great work of art and can distinguish between a performance of great quality and something that is fake or false, regardless of genre. Classical music will never have mass appeal (it never did!) but great works of art will continue to be presented to an appreciative audience. We have to ensure the ‘opportunity of exposure’ is offered to those susceptible to forming the audience of tomorrow.

Bruno Giuranna

5) Is there anyone out there who you particularly admire, and who has influenced you?

My teachers and coaches are the formative influences. From the very first violin lesson at age 16! They only encouraged me to pursue my dream – although in retrospect, they probably had their doubts! Then there are the musicians that I met in masterclasses: Bruno Giuranna in Sienna and England, William Primrose for successive summers in Banff; the great conductors I played under when I was Principal Viola of the Quebec Symphony. It is no secret, the musicians I engage for the TSM Festival, many of them good friends and colleagues, are the musicians I admire the most. Come join us at the 2013 festival, and you’ll see why!

~~~~~~~

Toronto Summer Music runs July 16th until August 3rd.  For further information click here.

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Love is a Poverty You Can Sell 2

Posted on July 5, 2013 by barczablog

Click for full size poster

Think the title’s long? that’s not even the full title.  It’s Love is a Poverty You Can Sell 2: Kisses for a Pfennig, the latest production from Soup Can Theatre.  When I saw it I figured yes this is a labour of love, a project that the company enjoys. It’s a bit awkward sounding, as though taken from a lyric translated from German.

LIAPYCS2 is currently running at the Toronto Fringe Festival, at “Bite”, the lower part of Moskito + Bite, a versatile new space on College at Bathurst, and a fascinating addition to a vibrant neighbourhood (beside Sneaky Dee’s near Kensington Market).

Now I wish I had seen the original.  I wonder if it was as good as this show (the sequel)?

I find myself wondering about the process of creation, the assembly of the materials.  Directed & choreographed by Sarah Thorpe, conducted by Pratik Gandhi, the program says the show was “curated” by Thorpe, Gandhi & Justin Haigh, as if in recognition of the delicacy of this process, We’ve seen other shows in the Toronto area that flirt with a cabaret sensibility in various ways.  Some aim for being true to the original period, where their authenticity is understood according to the Weimar model.  But to be truly authentic the performance needs to speak directly to the audience, to be intelligible and urgent.  It can’t be a museum piece (speaking of curation).

That’s what Soup Can Theatre achieved in this combination of old (a few songs by Weill and Hollander in translation) & more recent (Sondheim, Nilsson, & a song from Urinetown).  The universals of the Weimar cabarets –their sexual & political edginess, their dark themes—don’t fade away.

The show has a very raw, unfinished quality to it.  While there are trained singers & dancers onstage, the presentation is in your face, sometimes subtle & intimate.

Christian Jeffries in Love is a Poverty You Can Sell 2 (Photo Courtesy of Lauren Vandenbrook –www.lvimagery.net)

I was especially impressed by Christian Jeffries in his two appearances, a contrasting pair if ever there was one.  Whereas his first song is over-the-top funny, as he is mercilessly upstaged by his backup dancing troupe, the second (“Lili Marlene” ) literally brought me to tears, the subtlest performance of the night.

From what I’ve surmised online (google being a poor substitute for seeing Soup Can’s previous cabaret) this is a longer & more elaborate show than the last one.  Sometimes we’re in dark territory, as in “Don’t be the Bunny” or “Coin Operated Boy”, while other moments are  more soulful & lyrical such as Weill’s “”Youkali” or Hollander’s “Falling in Love Again”.  Pratik Gandhi leads an ensemble of 14 (if I counted right), at times raucous in their enthusiasm but never covering the singers.

Soup Can Theatre’s Love is a Poverty You Can Sell 2 continues at Bite on College St until July 14th as part of the 25th Fringe Festival.

Posted in Dance, theatre & musicals, Reviews | 4 Comments

Harnass The Worm

Posted on June 28, 2013 by barczablog

I remember taking Psych 100 long ago as an undergrad.  Many of our lessons required us to read articles from publications such as Scientific  American.   I recall one such article concerning eidetic memory, a phenomenon popularly known as “photographic memory”.  The subject was presented with great seriousness although I couldn’t really connect with the topic.

Years later the subject came back to mind, when I was thinking about how we experience music.

There are at least two phenomena that come to mind surrounding what we hear and how our minds retain what we’ve heard.

FIRST the bad one.    When a tune sticks in our head no matter what we do, it’s called an ear worm.  While we may resent the musical invasion, in a real sense it’s a triumph for the composer.  Many of the subjects in the symphonies of Beethoven or Mozart are just like that. Watch this clip, and wait for the punch-line, roughly two minutes into the clip: the third piece of music that might be by Salieri. 

If you were writing a Broadway musical, you couldn’t do any better than to have patrons walking out of the theatre humming music from your show.  If I could write a song that people felt compelled to sing, that they couldn’t get out of their heads, surely that would be an objective to shoot for.   A jingle writer seeking to promote a product would hope that their song would stick in your head.  The best example I can think of that is Barry Manilow’s “you deserve a break today”.   This version is already 2nd generation, because the tune is embedded in a musical number, only rearing its powerful head in the final seconds of this ad.

I recall a pedagogical version of the ear-worm, a tune on PBS called “Conjunction Junction” from Schoolhouse Rock. By creating a tune that stays with the listener grammar lessons are taught.

And SPEAKING of pedagogy, it’s cool that we’re looking at how the mind works.  Do we know why some songs stick in our heads?  Presumably it’s something about the song that makes us sing it over and over.   When I think about Mozart, Manilow and Schoolhouse Rock, they all have an organic flow, making the tunes seem inevitable.  I wonder if there’s a threshold of complexity involved.  Notice that we’re talking about simplicity rather than complexity.  I am trying to recall dissonant & complex examples of compositional gems, dubious as to whether an ear worm is ever atonal.

It may seem like a radical thought, to speak of great music in the same terms as ear-worms, but when you think of it, some classical compositions are great precisely because they stick in your head.  And while we may resent a jingle that sticks in our head, it’s another matter entirely if it’s a passage from a symphony or opera.

So maybe it’s not so bad after all.

I will write about the SECOND kind next time.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays, Psychology and perception | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Reinhardt’s first and last film

Posted on June 26, 2013 by barczablog

I was chatting with a friend about one of my favourite movies. Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummernight’s Dream from 1935 is simultaneously very new and very old. While its black & white appearance hardly suggests anything cutting edge, its use of Sprechstimme is very original. I believe it’s the first film making references to the iconography of the Third Reich, so early in its anti-fascism that nobody –except the European refugees such as Korngold & Reinhardt who participated in the film—understood the references.
July 1st is Olivia De Havilland’s 97th birthday. Believe it or not, of the three members of the film who are still alive she is second oldest. Mickey Rooney, who will have his 93rd birthday September 23, is merely the third oldest. Nini Theilade just had her 98th on June 15th.
Here’s a post about the film from a couple of years ago.

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The 1935 Warner Brothers A Midsummernight’s Dream (AMSD) directed by Max Reinhardt, is one of my favourite films.  This week I will once again get the pleasure of including it in my film music course.

If wishes were horses beggars would ride.  Ambition is another kind of wish, particularly when encapsulated in PR.  AMSD never seems to live up to the hype of the eight minute promotional film short (see immediately below: click on it to see it on youtube), because its chief ambition was not about box office success but prestige for Warner Brothers, who believed they had an image problem as purveyors of gangster pictures.


Talk about a strange and eclectic mix.  Reinhardt aims high, with his powerfully symbolic style, including two long and contrasting set-pieces.  Each one features long extended musical passages from Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play, arranged by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (his first…

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The Birth of an Opera

Posted on June 22, 2013 by barczablog

I’m enjoying The Birth of an Opera, a fascinating book by Michael Rose.

My jaw dropped at the simplicity of the concept of the work, and now I’m thoroughly hooked by the smoothness of Rose’s execution.

Rose combines two very different flavours into an intoxicating cocktail.

  • As with Opera as Drama, or Literature as Opera, to name the first two examples of the type that come to mind, The Birth of an Opera takes us through the history of opera via a series of fifteen case studies of great works
  • As with Harper’s Index or books such as Debussy Remembered (I am sure there are many other such books), clearly derivative of Lewis Lapham’s de facto approach to journalism, the case studies in The Birth of an Opera create their stories from contemporary testimony

It’s very hard to put down.  Each of these case studies –from L’Incoronazione di Poppea to Wozzeck—has the urgency of an episode of CSI, minus the police or the body count.

When it’s Fidelio we’re reading Beethoven, the opera’s librettist Sonnliethner, the Viennese court librettist Treitschke, plus comments from reviewers at performances.   For Les Troyens we’re reading Rose + Berlioz, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, considering how well Berlioz could write.  For Tristan und Isolde we’re again mostly immersed in the words of the composer, but also Liszt and Robert von Hornstein, one of Wagner’s friends.

The book is constructed in a manner to remind me of opera.  Rose writes connective tissue that is like recitative between arias, to allow us to flow from one nugget to the next.  This hybrid discourse combining historical documents with Rose’s prose are as artificial as the operas themselves.

It’s the most exciting book about opera that I’ve encountered in a very long time.

Bravo!

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Bridal grooming

Posted on June 21, 2013 by barczablog

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to play keyboard (organ + piano) at a wedding.  I said yes enthusiastically, even though I haven’t done this in quite awhile.  While I play the organ at my church from time to time, I last played a wedding in the 20th century.  On top of that I haven’t played much of late.  Although I found a nice groove in the winter through hours spent at the keyboard, I was aware that I’d not played so much of late.

For awhile all I did was think, and it was a question of repertoire.  The bride would settle what I’d play at the wedding (a pleasant question that I enjoyed answering with her), but meanwhile, what was I to play to wake up my fingers, and calm my brain?  I went AWOL from Blogville, pondering that deep life question “what shall I play”.   It may not be obvious, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking.  Lately I was wasting away in Blogville precisely because thinking is in some respects the opposite of blogging.  This is not a place where I think a great deal.  When I am in a writing groove, the paragraphs come out of me without much thought.  Clearly that is not where I am now, although I’m trying to get back there.

But I did play a lot the past couple of weeks.  Just as the blogging is often instinctive, following natural paths of association, so too with the rep choices.   A friend posted a snapshot of the front page of the Diabelli Variations.  Good. I pulled them out and played them.

I’d been reading Stewart Goodyear’s fascinating commentaries on Facebook, on the Beethoven Sonatas, as he prepared to play the Sonatathon: the sequel to last year’s Marathon.  Yes, that was the obvious choice.  I went logically from the Diabelli, in C and written after sonata 32, op 111 (finishing in C), knowing that I’d be riding a big arc through the 32 sonatas, right back to C major, via three of my favourite sonatas, each an assault on C:

  • Op 2 #3
  • Op 53, aka “The Waldstein”
  • Op 111

I asked Goodyear to name his favourite sonata –a tough question considering the Shakespearean depths of the 32 sonatas–and he gave a forthright answer, identifying the sonata Op 28. Am I a sneak in answering my own question with a trick answer? But i’d say my favourite sonata is the sonata in C.  THE sonata in C? That is, Op 2 #3, the Waldstein, and Op 111, because i see them as one long elaborated exploration of the key of C.  I’d even strain credibility further by tossing the Diabelli variations into the mix, because of the parallels & similarities between the last pages of the four works.

I feel that Beethoven revisited keys with the earlier works still in his head.  It was already something I’d thought, but it’s much clearer thanks to Mr Goodyear, who encourages me to see the sonatas as parts of organic groups by making me feel okay about playing hours of Beethoven in a sitting.  All three of these sonatas end with tinkly trilling effects you don’t hear in any other sonata, sounds that also turn up in the last of the Diabelli variations.  These are among Beethoven’s most utopian pieces.  I know we think of the 5th Symphony in this context –HELLO I just remember what key that one ends in… so perhaps we can admit the symphony to this discussion—but I am not thinking of political revolution, as we find in Fidelio (again redolent with passages in C) or Egmont.  I mean a kind of psychological utopia of peace and tranquility.  Both the Waldstein & Op 111 seem to divide in the most radical way of any of the sonatas.

  • Waldstein: tense opening, tiny transitional movement (one page long) followed by serene tinkling finale
  • Op 111: tense opening in C minor, followed by a magisterial set of variations, almost like a valedictory

It’s now the night before the wedding.  I happily navigated through the 32 sonatas, including days when I played for more than an hour straight.  I am thinking a lot about the therapeutic power of music, especially when we’re playing rather than listening.  In the Bible we read how Saul called upon David to play for him when he was depressed; too bad the Israelite king never learned how to play or sing for himself.  When i think of the longevity of conductors, i have to say that’s the best medicine. I’m thinking about music & spirit, the ministry of music.  It’s a truism that conductors live a long time, sustained by the joy that’s all around them, the joy that the music generates.  Music is an essential part of a wedding, not because of tradition, but because music is part of celebration.  I found my way back to the church (went regularly as a child, stopped in my teens), led by music.

It’s a wonderful privilege to be at the centre of a celebration, whether it’s a funeral, a wedding, a baptism, a party or just a concert.  I’m thinking not so much about the brain on music—Levitin’s book prominent in my thoughts—as the spirit on music.

Performance is redemptive in its employment of our brains, drawn in without leaving us stranded high and dry inside our heads, because our bodies are needed too.  I found that when I sat down, the first sonata I’d undertake would be the most indifferent, the weakest no matter where I started.  I’d get fresher, clearer, bolder, the more sonatas I played in a sitting.  Last Friday night I went from a bleary-eyed Op 28 –Goodyear’s favourite—through the three Op 31 sonatas, the two delicate little Op 49 sonatas (used by Goodyear to begin his marathon), finishing with total clarity on the Waldstein.  Somebody should wire a brain while playing to see what’s happening.  Levitin studies how we receive music, but maybe the experience of playing needs to be examined further.  I felt way better at the end than at the beginning.  The exultation one feels in any of these C major pieces is clearer than an orgasm, but at times every bit as intense as sex.  Here for example, is a page that I’d call the most satisfying page of Beethoven i can think of, and forgive me if we’re cheating, because we don’t listen to the hour of variations that has to come first.

I’m ready to play, at the wedding… Why do I drift away, why don’t i play every day?  It’s as important as breathing.

Posted in Music and musicology, Personal ruminations & essays, Spirituality & Religion | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Architect, house thyself

Posted on June 20, 2013 by barczablog

University of Toronto are undertaking an ambitious building project, the new home of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.  But it’s not that it’s a tall building or a unique shape; that’s not what’s especially daring about it.

It’s more a matter of principles, a question of integrity.

When you think about it, where should you house a school of architecture?  Academic departments can be housed just about anywhere: so long as the school’s home is not in any sense symbolic of its mission or its values.

Ideally a discipline should connect theory to practice, building a bridge between words & deeds.  When the discipline is the one concerned with building & design, the place to teach those disciplines isn’t an incidental matter.  If no one investigates or questions the relationship between the design of the space & the school’s functions & objectives, there’s a potential disconnect.

I’m excited to hear of this development, right in my neighbourhood.  A great deal of thought has gone into it. I am impressed by the idea of an architecture school that seeks to embody important principles such as sustainability, inclusiveness and equity.  The new building has the potential to inspire students as though it were a kind of embodiment of their goals, a kind of practical manifesto.

Artist’s rendering of One Spadina Crescent

The project also seems to rescue a beautiful old building that’s in need of renovation, namely the old Connaught Lab at 1 Spadina Crescent.  There’s a curious echo of one of the oldest tendencies in housing artists.  Again and again we’ve seen parts of our city (as in other cities on this continent) that once were the most affordable neighbourhoods for artists—usually marginal real estate no one else wants— gradually transformed. What is unwanted then becomes known as cool.  Eventually the neighbourhoods become gentrified, becoming the jewels of the city.  It was true for Yorkville, as it was for Queen St W.  In this case, the cool old building –1 Spadina Crescent– was home to the student newspaper and Art Department studio spaces.  If I don’t miss my guess, the coolness of the gorgeous old Gothic building won’t be lost in the new project; indeed that’s probably one of the subtexts driving the design.  The new building seems to function as a new gateway to the west side of the campus.

I can’t wait.

Watch the video for a sense of the ambitions underlying the project.

Posted in Art, Architecture & Design, Personal ruminations & essays, University life | 1 Comment

Bronzes by Ai Weiwei in Nathan Phillips Square

Posted on June 19, 2013 by barczablog

“Press releases and announcements” are presented verbatim without comment.

AGO unveils monumental bronze sculpture
series by artist Ai Weiwei in Toronto’s
Nathan Phillips Square
Majestic 50,000 pound sculpture installation adorns Toronto City Hall’s reflecting pool in advance of AGO summer exhibition, Ai Weiwei: According to What?

TORONTO—The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) unveiled Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s monumental sculpture series Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Bronze in the reflecting pool of Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square today. The installation precedes the AGO’s summer exhibition Ai Weiwei: According to What?, opening on Aug. 17, 2013. Toronto is the only Canadian stop on the exhibition’s North American tour.

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is a collection of 12 spectacular bronze animal heads representing the traditional figures of the Chinese Zodiac. The installation, made possible in part by the City of Toronto which generously allowed the use of the popular reflecting pool outside City Hall, is on display until Sept. 22, 2013.

Ai, who is under constant surveillance and has been unable to leave China since the government confiscated his passport in 2011, is supportive of the AGO’s initiative to share his works publicly. As a political activist and champion of freedom of expression, Ai has been publicly critical of the Chinese government’s record of human rights violations.

“Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is an incredible piece of public sculpture and a living testament to Ai Weiwei’s belief that art is for everyone,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, director and CEO of the AGO. “By installing this monumental art work in Nathan Phillips Square, we are offering Torontonians a chance to preview Ai’s prodigious talent, and proclaiming to visitors that our city is a place with an insatiable appetite for art and culture. I’d like to extend my most sincere thanks to the City of Toronto and City Council for making this extraordinary opportunity possible.” Larry Warsh, a friend of the artist and organizer of the Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Bronze world tour added, “Ai Weiwei is pleased to see that the Canadian people embrace the democratic spirit behind his work.”

The heads are installed in order according to the Chinese zodiac: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. Standing 10 feet high, each sculpture ranges in weight from 1,500 to 2,100 pounds and is supported by a marble base weighing 600 to 1,000 pounds. The sculptures’ combined weight of over 46,000 pounds required consultation from a structural engineer for installation in the reflecting pool. The Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads have been previously exhibited in London, Los Angeles, New York, Sao Paulo, Taipei and Washington D.C. among other cities.

“The City of Toronto is pleased and proud to partner with the AGO to install this important work by such an influential artist,” said Mayor Rob Ford. “This sculpture series is not just visually powerful, but it is also a great example of public art, as it can easily be appreciated by people of all ages and backgrounds. Staging this work under Nathan Phillips Square’s Freedom Arches also shows that the City of Toronto is deeply committed to supporting and protecting artistic expression and the right to free speech for all.”

AGO extends invitation to Chinese-speaking Torontonians

The installation of these sculptures is one of a number of initiatives the AGO is undertaking this summer to draw attention to Ai’s remarkable work. Directed by Toronto artist Gein Wong, the Gallery invites Torontonians who speak a Chinese dialect to participate in Say Their Names, Remember, a live reading of the names of the thousands of schoolchildren who perished in the devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan province on May 12, 2008. This initiative was inspired by Ai’s powerful art works Remembrance (2010) and Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (2008-11). Volunteers who wish to participate in a reading of the names on Aug. 18, 2013 can register at http://www.ago.net/aiweiwei-names.

Nathan Phillips Square will host another Ai Weiwei work this fall through Scotiabank Nuit Blanche with the installation of a new edition of Ai’s Forever Bicycles (2013)—a sculpture of more than 1,000 bicycles—as part of this year’s celebrations on Oct. 5, 2013. Further details will be announced by the City of Toronto later this summer.

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ABOUT CIRCLE OF ANIMALS/ZODIAC HEADS
Crafted in China, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads recreates a series of sculptures designed in the 18th century by Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione, which once adorned the famed fountain-clock of the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), an imperial retreat outside Beijing. In 1860 the original zodiac sculptures were pillaged by invading French and British soldiers during the Second Opium War and only seven are known to still exist; five have been repatriated to China, but ownership of two remains contested. In re-interpreting the original zodiac sculptures on an oversized scale, Ai focuses attention on questions of looting and repatriation, while extending his ongoing exploration of the ‘fake’ and the copy in relation to the original. The dual title alludes to the two ways viewers can understand the work—as a literal menagerie and as a traditional Chinese cycle.

ABOUT AI WEIWEI: ACCORDING TO WHAT?
Organized by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Ai Weiwei: According to What? arrives at the AGO for its only Canadian appearance following a successful run at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Featuring large-scale sculptures, photography, installations, video and audio work, Ai’s art draws on both western consumerism and traditional Chinese symbols and objects. With humour and wit alongside solemn expression, the exhibition chronicles the artist’s work from the mid-1990s to the present and makes visible the often fragile links that bind individuals to history, art and each other. Following its run at the AGO, Ai Weiwei: According to What? will be be presented at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

ABOUT AI WEIWEI
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) has been the recipient of numerous grants, honours and awards, most recently in 2012 the inaugural Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent of the Human Rights Foundation; the International Center of Photography Cornell Capa Award; an honourary fellowship from the Royal Institute of British Architects; an Honourary Degree from Pratt Institute; and a foreign membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. Other honours over the past five years include a Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Lifetime Achievement; an International Architecture Award for Tsai Residence; Das Glas der Vernunft (The Prism of Reason), Kassel Citizen Award; The Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation Award for Courage; the Skowhegan Medal for Multidisciplinary Art; Wallpaper Design Award Best New Private House for Tsai Residence; and a Wall Street Journal Innovators Award (Art). Ai Weiwei is consistently included in top artist and human rights lists, including GQ Men of the Year in 2009 (Germany); the Art Review Power 100, rank 43 in 2009; the Art Review Power 100, rank 13 in 2010; the Art Review Power 100, rank one in 2011; Foreign Policy Top Global Thinkers of 2011, rank 18; and runner up in Time’s Person of the Year in 2011. Ai Weiwei helped establish Beijing East Village in 1993, co-founded the China Art Archives & Warehouse in 1997 and founded the architecture studio FAKE Design in 2003. He studied at the Beijing Film Academy, Parsons School of Design and Art Students League of New York; upon returning to China he collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ai Weiwei: According to What? was organized by the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and the Art Gallery of Ontario. It was curated by the Mori Art Museum’s chief curator, Mami Kataoka.

Leadership gifts in support of the exhibition from Emmanuelle Gattuso & Allan Slaight and the Hal Jackman Foundation.
Additional generous support from The Delaney Family Foundation, Donner Canadian Foundation, Partners in Art and Francis & Eleanor Shen. Assistance from media partner The Globe and Mail.

The installation of Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads was made possible in part by the AW Asia, New York.

Contemporary programming at the AGO is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is funded in part by the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport. Additional operating support is received from the City of Toronto, the Canada Council for the Arts and generous contributions from AGO members, donors and private-sector partners.

ABOUT THE AGO
With a collection of more than 80,000 works of art, the Art Gallery of Ontario is among the most distinguished art museums in North America. From the vast body of Group of Seven and signature Canadian works to the African art gallery, from the cutting-edge contemporary art to Peter Paul Rubens’ masterpiece The Massacre of The Innocents, the AGO offers an incredible art experience with each visit. In 2002 Kenneth Thomson’s generous gift of 2,000 remarkable works of Canadian and European art inspired Transformation AGO, an innovative architectural expansion by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry that in 2008 resulted in one of the most critically acclaimed architectural achievements in North America. Highlights include Galleria Italia, a gleaming showcase of wood and glass running the length of an entire city block, and the often-photographed spiral staircase, beckoning visitors to explore. The AGO has an active membership program offering great value, and the AGO’s Weston Family Learning Centre offers engaging art and creative programs for children, families, youth and adults. Visit ago.net to find out more about upcoming special exhibitions, to learn about eating and shopping at the AGO, to register for programs and to buy tickets or memberships.

Aug. 17, 2013 – Oct. 27, 2013: Ai Weiwei: According to What?

Sept. 25, 2013 – Nov. 27, 2013: David Bowie is

Nov. 30, 2013 – March 2, 2014: The Great Upheaval: Modern Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection

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Cats came back

Posted on June 14, 2013 by barczablog


I’m thinking of a dark coloured t-shirt with eyes looking out of a dark background.  It’s in a child’s size, a much-loved shirt commemorating a happy memory excuse the pun of a fun show.  Now?  That child is now a mom, with her own child ready to see the show, ready for her own T-shirt (we bought one).

A generation later, Cats is back.  In its first visit I recall that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical was presented as a serious work with formal trappings, even if children were welcomed.  This time, however, I believe the show is truer to its roots.

ALW adapted a childhood favourite, namely TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  While the work was –and is—highly original in its dramaturgy, the edginess of its style may have obscured the most obvious fact lurking in the background: that this show is not just an acceptable entertainment for children, but a family-friendly work of great simplicity & directness.

This time around Mirvish Productions seem to have a great deal of clarity about this.  Children are welcome to walk right up onto the stage during the intermission to see the set up close, snapping pictures with their smart-phones.  The marketing is at least as pervasive as before (T-shirts, CDs, decorative bags and more).  We’re more informal in the Panasonic Theatre, eating ice cream or drinking alcoholic cocktails, same as if we were at a ball game (i wish i could take my wine glass into the opera).

The theatre is full of children with parents revisiting their own happy memory from a generation ago.

While it’s the same score, some things are different.  I asked my friend Stephen Farrow, English music-theatre scholar, for his recollections about the original.

Cats in London used a conductor (and an 18-piece band, and four singers in a booth backstage to sweeten the sound in the big dance numbers), but not an orchestra pit. An orchestra pit would have been physically impossible, given that the entire stage and the first four rows of seats revolved through 180 degrees during the overture! The band (and the conductor) were in a room backstage. They didn’t repeat the revolving-stage-and-seats thing anywhere else (in London, it was staged three-quarters in the round), but they usually built the stage out over the orchestra pit, and the band was always somewhere backstage.”

Synthesizers have come a long way in the last thirty years, as have microphones & sound technology.  There’s CGI now, and if I am being objective, I think musicianship has progressed too.  Lona Davis leads a very tight show that ebbs and flows easily, leading from the keyboard as one of three keyboardists, with bass, guitar, two players on assorted woodwinds and a drummer/percussionist. Sometimes less is more.  Technology is probably part of this, as the monitoring & controlling of cues is wonderfully clean, apparently effortless, but I think, too, that this kind of show is now the norm rather than the exception: where singers are followed by a small ensemble without a conductor or an orchestra pit to disrupt the illusion.  It’s a tour de force even if perfection is expected.

Another difference that I think I detect is simply the nature of performance.  Cats is mostly populated with triple threats: people who can sing, act & dance.  In practice this usually means that the demands in the dramatic or vocal realms can’t be too outrageous, but there’s no mistaking the physical prowess of these Jellicles bounding across the stage.  If I remember correctly, one couldn’t easily assemble a cast of capable dancers who could also sing and act in the 1980s; but theatre schools seem to be filling that need nowadays, influenced by shows like this one.  What was a new performance vocabulary back then is now much more intelligible, not so daunting.  As a result Cats seems much more classical, unforced and poised in its balleticism.  It makes me want to re-appraise (upwardly) its place in ALW’s oeuvre.

The work seems boldly quaint, at once familiar and edgy because I see how daring it must have felt.  Without Cats you can’t have Lion King, to give the most obvious example.  While musicals were changing throughout that decade this show’s originality stands out, as i look back. There’s almost no story whatsoever.  If the conventional wisdom is that music begins where the words leave off, this is a special case, a through-composed work that brashly takes the stage with very little dramatic action.

I’ve been very conflicted about ALW: a man whose borrowings have long troubled me, less for the loose resemblance between “I don’t know how to love him” (in 4/4) & the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (in 3/4), than for the powerful Pink Floyd riff in “Echoes” that’s exactly like the most powerful tune in Phantom.  Having acknowledged what bothers me, i need to also admit his brilliance.  A musical is a very different animal excuse the pun from an opera. Cats is only one of several scores that make him arguably the most successful original composer of musicals over the last 50 years.  While I prefer Sondheim (and btw here’s a funny factoid for you, the three of us –Songheim, ALW and me—share the same birthday…one day earlier and it would be JS Bach.  Oh well), ALW has done much better at the box office.  Sondheim is more of a classical composer selling works to the musical theatre world.  Just as in the opera world Puccini gets denigrated for the sin of writing beautiful operas that make people cry, so too ALW in the realm of musicals.  Sondheim may be the critics’ darling, but box office doesn’t lie.  The audience is the ultimate judge.

Presented in the intimate Panasonic theatre (roughly 700 seats, without a proscenium arch), we’re watching Cameron Macintosh’s original but described as “an all-new Canadian production” directed by Dave Campbell.  Martin Samuel is an impressive Rum Tum Tugger, boldly taking the stage with a lovely voice.  Charles Azulay was an audience favourite as old Deuteronomy.

Perhaps the most challenging part is the high profile role of Grizabella, who sings that song, the one that everyone knows so well that it’s a struggle to avoid cliché.  Ma-Anne Dionisio gets to sing the song twice.  In the first act it’s subtler, leaving us wanting more, and indeed Dionisio held lots in reserve, suggesting the sorts of profundities in the song that may have been there once, before radios played it to death.  In the second act, when she didn’t back away from making a strong statement with the song, she seemed to get right inside it, surpassing my expectations.

Cats runs at least until the end of June (as I see a performance added for June 30th).  If you’ve never seen it, I believe you’d enjoy it.  If you’ve seen it, and especially if you have children I would strongly recommend that you take them.  It makes a splendid introduction to the theatre, and yes, an enjoyable night out.  http://www.mirvish.com/shows/cats

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Chopin: Iconosphere of Romanticism

Posted on June 13, 2013 by barczablog

You gotta love the title of the book.

It’s actually CHOPIN: Iconosphere of Romanticism, emblazoned simultaneously on the cover in Polish as CHOPIN: iconosfera romantyzmu.  This is an art-book, recording an exhibit from 2010 in Warsaw, edited by Iwona Danielewicz with the assistance of Andrzej Dzięciołowski, published by The National Museum in Warsaw.

There’s a certain justice in the bilingual cover even if the composer’s second culture is French not English.  His father is the Frenchman, while his mother was Polish.  The first twenty years of his life were spent in Poland, while the other half (almost exactly) of his short life was spent mostly in France.  The book was published in 2010, another of the many celebrations of the bicentennial of the composer’s birth.

I’m a big fan of attempts to put artists into context.  I admire the ambition behind such endeavors even if I retain a healthy skepticism.  So for example I keep reading about Chopin with Liszt, usually decoded via the modern understanding of these two, where Liszt’s virtuosity is something spoken of apologetically.  That may be part of the background, but I don’t believe that’s really putting it in context, not if we bring a 21st Century distaste for virtuosic display.  While Chopin is spoken of as subtler than Liszt (in this book, reflecting the usual critical prejudice), was that because he was more tasteful, or merely because he couldn’t bring an equivalent skill-set to the table?

(I leave that up to you)

It’s a given that Chopin is presented as part of the Romantic movement in the first half of the 19th Century.  Considering the title (especially when I focus on the word “Iconosphere”) this project is meant to conjure a movement.  While I eat this sort of thing up –who doesn’t like beautiful pictures?—I have some hesitation.  I don’t think of Chopin as a Romantic, at least not when we think of the quintessential romantics such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz & Liszt plus their transitional antecedents Schubert & Beethoven.

The book is a celebratory feast but…. a feast celebrating the thin ascetic seems a bit incongruous. Perhaps it’s because I put Chopin in a special category.  His piano music transcends categories.  I think of his cycle of Preludes Op 28 in context with Bach’s Well-tempered Klavier, another cycle of compositions that seems universal in the way it encompasses all of the key signatures, seemingly so pure as to be independent of period or context.  He’s one of the mountains of keyboard pedagogy that must be climbed.

So pardon me if I simultaneously eat up the romantic pictures, even as I think they’re redundant.  Chopin doesn’t require the imaginative gloss, charming as it is.

I feel a bit guilty speaking of a book that I couldn’t find on Amazon, but only on Google.  Thank goodness for libraries.

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